[mburbank]

"Miller said he had reviewed the U.S. Army's interrogation manual's list of 53 techniques for questioning prisoners and spoke to Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, the top general in Iraq.

"He has approved my recommendation to restrict some of those techniques," Miller said.

On Tuesday, the U.S. military said it was ordering troops to use blindfolds instead of hoods and requiring interrogators to get permission before depriving inmates of sleep or keeping them in stressful positions for extended periods — two of the most common techniques reported by freed Iraqis. "
-AP wire

I think a public airing of what these '53 techniques' are is in order, as are deffinitions of terms. What exactly does 'stressful position' mean? How long is an 'extended period'. Most people suppose that America does not torture POW's, but the deffinition of 'torture' is loose. I think a thorough descrription of the techniques we use to interrogate people, and the techniques used to 'soften' them prior to interogation would strike many, many people as torture.

You may recall pictures of naked man duct taped to a board. That would be John Walker Lindh, and American citizen. To me, that looked like something a civilzed country doesn't need to do. It looked more like vengance, something I understand the desire for but I don't understand the institutionalization of.

I think, at very least, the deliberate humiliation of prisoners in fairly awful ways, was something these people, however small in number, felt allowed to do. You don't take and circulate photos of secrets. It's obvious they enjoyed it, and it seems probable at very least a lot of people looked the other way.

Why should an Iraqi believe this was 'aberant'? Why would they now believe we were telling the truth about anything now? And if your argument is 'well, they hate us anyway', then what happens to the idea that we 'liberated' them and we're going to 'establish democracy'.